India-China relations back on track: Jaishankar

The ties between India and China are “better” today as compared to a couple of years ago, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said, underlining that as the border issues are resolved, the relationship returns to normalcy.

Jaishankar was responding to a question on India-China relations, which have seen an upswing in recent times, including with President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to India for the BRICS Leaders’ Summit hosted by New Delhi.

“If you asked me, compared to where you were in 2025, is the relationship better today? I would say yes. Compared to 2024, even more so,” Jaishankar said during a conversation hosted at Asia Society. He said it’s not so much a “structural change”, but part of the reason why things have improved is “they had gone so much off-track that the moment you stabilised it, it was going to improve, because after what happened in 2020 and the long standoff that we had on the border, the relationship had really been impacted.”

Following the 2020 border standoff between India and China, all “normal contacts” between the two nations had come to a halt, he said, adding that while “trade was continuing”, official exchanges, visa issuance, and flights had been impacted.

“So once the border standoff was resolved, it was natural that this would start to improve,” he said.

There was also this logic, which Delhi had long been conveying to Beijing, that a “standoff between us, a dip in our relationship, actually doesn’t help either of us. In fact, it is third parties who will take advantage of that.

“We also maintained consistently a very elementary principle of statecraft - don’t get locked into a problem which benefits others,” Jaishankar said. “It took a little while for the Chinese side to agree with that, for whatever reason, but I don’t think that long standoff served our interests. It certainly didn’t serve theirs. And to the extent there is an improvement in our relations, I think it certainly helps our position,” not only vis-a-vis China but vis-a-vis the rest of the world, he said. “Because I don’t want to get totally focused to my disadvantage on one particular relationship and issue. If I can find a solution which works for me, I would rather do that,” he said.

“We came down to a very fundamental principle, which is that the state of the border determines the state of the relationship.

You can’t have tension...on the border and say the relationship should be normal. So what we’ve had is, as the border comes back more towards normalcy, the relationship comes back more towards normalcy, and if the relationship comes back more towards normalcy, it helps both of us,” Jaishankar said.